It isn't, because there are numerous instances in the Bible of God directly commanding people to kill, and even punishing people for showing mercy.
"Thou shalt not kill" isn't a sin because human life is inherently valuable to God (reading the OT, it clearly isn't) but because humans are God's property, and so only God, who created humans, has the right to decide when and how they die. Under the particularly cruel and brutal Bronze Age ethics from which the Abrahamic God as a concept was derived, killing is perfectly justifiable when God wills it, and is only a sin otherwise because it defies God's will.
...which shouldn't even be possible if God is omnipotent but that's a whole other can of worms.
"Thou shalt not kill" is a rule that appears in every shortlist of rules that has been issued by any king, ever. The rule is there because every society has that rule. It doesn't apply to how you treat people that the king doesn't like, of course. But that exception applies equally to hittite kings and christian kings.
There are other commandments that are characteristic of christianity, but this is not one of them. "Thou shalt not" commandments are basically the same in all cultures. The "thou shalt" commandments are not.
I don’t think you grasp what “omnipotent” means. That literally means unlimited power, which would actually be an argument for why God has this authority.
On that note, who is being cruel here: A God who imposed rules on how he wants his creatures to behave to his other creatures; or a creature who hurts his other creatures, and then calls God cruel for stopping it?
Edit, to your reply:
> I know what omnipotent means. The contradiction is that it shouldn't be possible to violate the will of an omnipotent God.
You will have to provide some citations for such an axiom that aren’t based on an atheist stereotype of “omnipotent” and “will.”
TLDR of a Christian perspective:
God is love. Love does not exist outside of God. Love is defined as willing the good of another person. As such, love is fundamentally a choice. As such, humans must have a choice to love. To do otherwise, would make a human a robot. God knows what choice we will make, but does not force it. (A parent who knows the teen will not resist the cake on the counter, does not force the teen to eat cake.) It does not follow, that if humans refuse to love, God should nullify all consequences.
On that note, Hell was not made for humans but for Satan, and we as humans have only the ability to choose love (God) or absence of love (Hell). A person who has chosen to not love, logically cannot live with love itself. Viewing it as humans choosing to damn themselves by refusing to love, would be a more accurate perspective.
I know what omnipotent means. The contradiction is that it shouldn't be possible to violate the will of an omnipotent God.
You can invoke "free will", but that's just another layer of abstraction for the same problem. If free will truly exists, then God isn't omnipotent. If He does, free will cannot exist.
>On that note, who is being cruel here: A God who imposed rules on how he wants his creatures to behave to his other creatures; or a creature who hurts his other creatures, and then calls God cruel for stopping it?
God isn't cruel for imposing rules, God is cruel for allowing evil to persist and for punishing humans with eternal torment for a state of sin they cannot absolve themselves of. The God of the Bible is very obviously not good, or just, or even self-consistent. More than once He just lets humans into heaven because He likes them.
> If free will truly exists, then God isn't omnipotent. If He does, free will cannot exist.
This doesn't seem logical to me, but perhaps I'm missing something. Can God not be all powerful and yet decide to allow humans to make decisions for themselves?
Just thinking about my own children, while I am not all powerful, I certainly am powerful enough to force them to comply with most of my instructions. Yet I do not, since part of raising them is giving them the freedom to make mistakes and (hopefully) learn from them and do better.
The argument is not on the omnipotence alone, but the omniscience.
You can't be omniscient and omnipotent on one hand, and blame your creature for anything it does on the other. Because you are effectively in charge.
Like any parent with babies.
While you don't _know_ all about how they function, you learn to get a grasp of it, and you control most of their environment, and most of their very own, at first. They are babies. You job is to allow them to make decisions for themselves by teaching, supporting, caring for, loving them, and letting them grow, become autonomous, emancipate, and live their life. And live it without you because ultimately, that's what happens.
And as you do, you become less powerful, less all-knowing towards them (if you didn't, you'd keep full responsibility for everything they do).
So, come back to God, if He's omniscient, omnipotent, He's also all in charge. The creatures may have some will or not, whatever they do is already known in advance.
I agree that the interaction between omniscience and freewill is more convoluted, but the person I was responding to was very clearly stating that omnipotence was incompatible with freewill. They restated it several times and clarified that they knew what omnipotence meant.
Here is another Christian (Catholic even) perspective.
> God is love. [...] God knows what choice we will make, but does not force it.
> It does not follow, that if humans refuse to love, God should nullify all consequences.
If the omniscient, omnipotent God knows what choice we will make, He may not have forced it, but He did set the conditions and dynamic systems for this choice to happen, as He already knows, ahead of time. It's basically the same. There lies the contradiction (or let's call it paradox) of that argument.
> On that note, Hell was not made for humans but for Satan, and we as humans have only the ability to choose love (God) or absence of love (Hell). A person who has chosen to not love, logically cannot live with love itself. Viewing it as humans choosing to damn themselves by refusing to love, would be a more accurate perspective.
That is why Hell/Heaven is likely more a matter of (changing) perspective (how do I live/act with what I have) rather than a definitive objective place. Hell/Heaven is not some mythical afterlife meritocratic estate, it's firstly right here, right now, in each of us, the sum of all our actions and relationships.
And that is consistent with what is in the scriptures, what psychology and neuroscience tells us, and what common daily experience shows.
This is also why the "God is love" mantra is a good thing as long as it's not tweaked into a bizarre reverse way to justify that non-believers/observants of a specific ruleset of a specific religion have chosen to not love, or are "unsaved" and should therefore either be converted or suppressed.
"Thou shalt not kill" isn't a sin because human life is inherently valuable to God (reading the OT, it clearly isn't) but because humans are God's property, and so only God, who created humans, has the right to decide when and how they die. Under the particularly cruel and brutal Bronze Age ethics from which the Abrahamic God as a concept was derived, killing is perfectly justifiable when God wills it, and is only a sin otherwise because it defies God's will.
...which shouldn't even be possible if God is omnipotent but that's a whole other can of worms.